Some 12.8 billion light years away, astronomers have spotted an object of almost impossible brightness — the most luminous object ever seen in such ancient space. It’s from just 900 million years after the big bang, and the old quasar — a shining object produced by a massive black hole — is 420 trillion times more luminous and about 12 billion times larger than our sun.

That brightness and size is surprising in a black hole from so close to the dawn of time. In a new study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers describe a cosmic light that defies convention. It was even detectable with a relatively small telescope, though researchers in China did have to ask for help from astronomers in Chile and the United States to get a higher-resolution look.

“How could we have this massive black hole when the universe was so young? We don’t currently have a satisfactory theory to explain it,” said lead author Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University and the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

For the black hole to grow to such a staggering size in less than a billion years, the astronomers posit, it must have been pulling in interstellar mass from its surroundings at the maximum rate the whole time. Even so, the radiation of the quasar formed by the black hole should have started to limit that mass accumulation before such a size was reached.

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So there are puzzles left to be solved. But for now, Wu said, his team is using the brilliant quasar as a beacon to find other space objects.

“Just like a lighthouse sitting in a dark, distant universe,” he said, “it gives us a chance to see things in between our own planet and the black hole by illuminating them. It provides a unique chance to understand things between the distant galaxy and ours.”

Wu and his team have many follow-up observations planned for the coming year, including projects using space telescopes like the Hubble to get an even better look at things in and near this impressive quasar’s galaxy.

When he was not theorizing about gravity and the speed of light, what occupied a genius like Albert Einstein? Now we know.

In 1955, following Einstein’s death at the age of 76, his voluminous scientific and personal papers were donated to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he helped found in 1918. That gift led to the establishment of the university’s Albert Einstein Archives. This month, a joint project between Hebrew University and Princeton University — where Einstein lectured after he fled Nazi Germany and came to the United States in 1933 — and the California Institute of Technology has published thousands of Einstein’s letters and papers online at http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/. The documents, which also have been translated from German into English, provide a fascinating insight into one of the most unique minds in modern history.

The correspondence reveals his complicated love life, attitudes about fame, disdain for gossip-mongers and his support for Zionism

Apart from tracking how Einstein developed his theory of general relativity and formulated his celebrated equation e=mc2, among his other notable scientific work, the correspondence also reveals his complicated love life, attitudes about fame, disdain for gossip-mongers, the awakening of his Jewish identity and his support for Zionism.

Though Einstein’s parents were assimilated German Jews who thought of themselves as being “Israelites,” they did not approve of his relationship with Mileva Marić, a Serbian Eastern Orthodox Christian physicist, who he had met while studying in Switzerland.

“We are some little couple,” Marić wrote to him in July 1901. “Did you have, then, an open fight with your mother? Dear little sweetheart, how much you have to endure for me! And the only thing I have to give you for that is the little bit of love that dwells in the human heart.” In his letters to Marić, Einstein liked to refer to her affectionately as “my beloved sweetheart” or by the pet name, “Schnoxl.”

In May 1901, they rendezvoused at Lake Como in Italy and Marić became pregnant. She secretly gave birth to a little girl, Lieserl, the following January, while the couple still lived apart.

“Is she healthy and does she already cry properly?” Einstein asked about his daughter in a letter on Feb. 4, 1902. “What kind of little eyes does she have? Whom of us two does she resemble more? Who is giving her milk? Is she hungry? And so she is completely bald. I love her so much and I don’t even know her yet!”

It is unknown what happened to Lieserl. In a subsequent letter in September 1903, Einstein referred to the infant as suffering from scarlet fever. She may have died, or she might have been adopted by one of Marić’s friends. There is no further reference to the girl in Einstein’s papers after 1903, the year he married Marić.

Einstein and Marić had two sons. Their relationship, however, eventually faltered for the usual reasons — stress from work, money worries and another woman. In this case, Einstein fell in love with his first cousin, Elsa (Einstein) Löwenthal, who he married in 1919, immediately after he divorced Marić.

In May 1912, in one of the first love letters Einstein sent to Elsa, a divorced mother of two daughters, he wrote about “how much I would like to be something to you.” Even though he admitted that, “If we give in to our affection for each other, only confusion and misfortune will result. But you should never think that I let you down. I love you and I showed it to you honestly.”

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Within two years, Einstein was separated from Marić and living with Elsa in Berlin. On a trip to Zurich in October 1913, he confessed to her that he was no longer the same person. “I now have someone of whom I can think with unalloyed pleasure and for whom I can live.”

Documents in the collection trace his relations with Marić and his sons, who lived with their mother during the First World War, and the subsequent divorce proceedings. Among other stipulations, Einstein agreed to give to Marić 40,000 marks, along with any money he may receive for winning the Nobel Prize — which she did receive, when he won.

On occasion, Einstein was quick to anger, and few issues angered him more than unsubstantiated gossip and criticism in the press. In 1911, the Polish-born physicist Marie Curie, who lived in Paris and was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1903, was being considered for membership in the elitist French Academy of Sciences. Her candidacy was rejected, mainly due to nasty rumours in the right-wing Parisian press that she was Jewish (which she was not) and “thus not truly French,” as well as the fact that she was having an affair with physicist Paul Langevin, who was married (which she was).

In a letter to Curie on Nov. 23, 1911, Einstein, who could have been writing about today’s Internet trolls, suggested that, “if the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.”

AFP/Getty

Einstein was influenced by his parents’ indifference to Jewish ritual, though as a young boy he did have an interest in religion and Judaism. Once he moved to Berlin in 1914 to be with Elsa and become the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, where he would remain until 1933, he could not escape the tense political climate and prevalence of anti-Semitism in Germany — despite the fact that Jews made up less than 1% of the country’s population in 1920. The prevailing view was that German Jews had too much influence.

“When I first came to Germany 15 years ago,” Einstein wrote to a German government minister in 1925, “I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to gentiles than to Jews.… If we did not have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded and violent people, I would be the first to throw over all nationalism in favour of universal humanity.”

The clearest articulation of his feelings on being Jewish was a “confession” he wrote in April 1920 that was meant to remain private, but was made public five months later. It reaffirmed Einstein’s belief in a Jewish people and solidified his commitment to Zionism, whose proponents he had once dismissed as “impractical” and “medieval.”

“I am not a German citizen,” he wrote, “but I am a Jew, and I am glad to belong to the Jewish people, even though in no way do I consider them to be the chosen ones. Leave the Aryan to his anti-Semitism; and let us keep the love of our brethren.”

Einstein was never wholly comfortable with his fame, regarding “the cult of individual personalities” as “unjustified.” Hence, he probably would not have been thrilled with this very public access to his life. But, as he told philosopher and mathematician Maurice Solovine in March 1921, he was content with the fact that all the praise he had received had not “blackened my soul.”

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Historian and writer Allan Levine’s most recent book is, Toronto: Biography of a City.

In 1985, the English physicist Stephen Hawking was so gravely ill from the devastating effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that doctors in Switzerland, where he contracted a chest infection and fell into a coma, offered to remove life support and let him die.

Daily TelegraphStephen and Jane Hawking on their wedding day.

It fell to his then wife, Jane, to decline. She had him flown back to Cambridge, where he would go on to finish A Brief History of Time, the popular account of his penetrating insights into the nature of black holes and the universe itself.

Although the marriage ended five years later, the episode illustrated the central role of love in the career of the greatest living theoretical physicist.

That love has now been dramatized on the big screen, in the movie The Theory of Everything, based on Jane Hawking’s memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. (She now uses her maiden name, Wilde.)

Rather than a wonky scientific biopic or a tale of triumph over disability, the film is billed primarily as a love story. By recreating the key moments of Prof. Hawking’s romantic life, such as a May Ball in Cambridge highlighted by fireworks, it reveals love as a central motivating factor in scientific progress.

In the film, the public that is so often baffled by Prof. Hawking’s ideas can see beyond his equations into the heart of a man whose emotional horizons expanded just as a new world of theoretical physics opened up in the equations on the page before him. It makes a strong case that it was no mere coincidence that, as he fell in love, Prof. Hawking saw farther into the nature of the cosmos than anyone who had come before him, save possibly Albert Einstein.

“There’s a correlation in that,” said Amanda Peet, a physicist and expert in string theory at the University of Toronto. “Physicists who are thriving as human beings … we do better physics.”

Love fuels creativity, which is essential to groundbreaking science, she said, and the obstacles to scientific progress can feel like love gone wrong.

General relativity and quantum mechanics, for example, are two fundamental theories of physics, one at the very large scale and the other at the very small, both indispensable to physics. But when you try to combine them, as Prof. Hawking and others have done, they get along “like two people in a bad marriage,” giving “nonsensical answers to reasonable questions,” Prof. Peet said. She describes it as “theoretical carnage.”

When he described the physics of black holes with Roger Penrose back in the 1970s, Prof. Hawking identified a problem that has come to be known as the black hole information paradox, which basically holds that, if black holes truly are places of infinite mass from which nothing can escape, not even light, and they truly do compress matter into a single point of infinite density, then they must violate the laws of quantum mechanics, which hold that information about physical states cannot be destroyed.

This is the leading example of the “theoretical carnage” Prof. Peet described, and the paradox remains unresolved despite a new solution proposed this year by Prof. Hawking.

Given Prof. Hawking’s public profile as the top name in the most esoteric science, and a medical marvel who has survived longer and better than virtually anyone else with ALS, it is a wonder The Theory of Everything is not a movie about success against medical adversity.

It is not, for example, like My Left Foot, about a man overcoming the limitations of cerebral palsy, or A Beautiful Mind, about intellectual achievement despite serious cognitive impairment. Rather, it is about a physicist in love.

“That’s partly because of Stephen,” said Prof. Peet, a keen admirer of the professor who has met him several times in academic settings. “He actually discourages people from focusing on that. He doesn’t want to be known as the physicist in the wheelchair. … He’s a really astounding person.”

As Prof. Hawking told the film’s director, James Marsh, it was love that allowed him to become that person, to transcend the disease, and set the conditions for his genius to flourish. She loved him and cared for him, and as a result, “he was so free of practicalities, his mind was able to wander where it did to the far reaches of the universe.”

Black holes? Singularities? Unitarity? Some might wonder why the public should care about the esoteric, abstract work of Stephen Hawking. None of it will build a better toaster, after all. But Hawking’s work continues to drive physics at the very forefront — and ultimately may push us toward a theory that describes the very origin of our universe.

Hawking’s interest in black holes — which changed his life, and the future of physics — started in 1970, five years after he was diagnosed with ALS. He was collaborating with another noted mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, to show that the universe had to begin in an infinitely dense “singularity,” much like the final stages of black hole collapse.

Black holes are objects that are so dense that even light cannot escape them. Hawking’s work helped support the claim that only the mass, charge and spin of a black hole could be discerned from the outside, and that no other information about what previously had fallen inside it could ever be discerned.

However, when Hawking began to apply ideas from quantum mechanics to processes associated with black holes in 1974, he discovered something completely unexpected. Black holes can actually radiate particles. And that radiation causes the black hole to shrink, potentially to the point of disappearance.

“Hawking Radiation,” as it came to be known, was a stunning revelation in and of itself. But it also suggested something of larger consequence: If the black hole eventually radiated away all of its energy and disappeared in a final flash, it would violate one of the central tenets of quantum mechanics, that the information associated with material that had collapsed to form the black hole would disappear as well. This violates a principle at the heart of quantum mechanics, called “Unitarity.”

It is hard to overstate the impact of this realization. The effort to solve the “Black Hole Information Paradox” has helped drive much of the current thinking about fundamental physics — including the development of String Theory, an idea which attempted to unify Einstein’s General Relativity (which, prior to Hawking, was largely decoupled from the rest of physics) with Quantum Mechanics.

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Attempting to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity may suggest — as both Hawking and I agree — that all the space and time of our universe might have arisen from Nothing as a spontaneous quantum fluctuation, without the need for any supernatural shenanigans. This, in turn, could help us grapple with questions that have been around since the dawn of human perception: How did the Universe begin? How might it end? What is our place in the cosmos?

So, no improved toaster. But addressing these, and other fundamental questions about our existence — like art, music and literature — forms the very essence of what it means to be human. And Hawking’s intellectual bravery, his refusal to give up his quest for knowledge in the face of a debilitating illness, provides a remarkable tribute to the power of human will.

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Lawrence M. Krauss, a Canadian theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is also the author of bestselling books including The Physics of Star Trek (with a foreword by Stephen Hawking) and A Universe from Nothing (with afterword by Richard Dawkins).

]]>http://arts.nationalpost.com/full-comment/stephen-hawkings-work-just-might-explain-our-place-in-the-cosmos/feed/0stdhawkingHubble found one of the oldest galaxies we’ve ever seen, and it just may change how we understand the universehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/hubble-found-one-of-the-oldest-galaxies-weve-ever-seen-and-it-just-may-change-how-we-understand-the-universe
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/hubble-found-one-of-the-oldest-galaxies-weve-ever-seen-and-it-just-may-change-how-we-understand-the-universe#commentsFri, 17 Oct 2014 18:19:17 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=531197

The Hubble Space Telescope might be 24 years old, but it’s still making discoveries that are changing the way we see and understand our universe. Hubble’s latest feat was to image one of the faintest, smallest, and oldest galaxies astronomers have ever seen.

The galaxy’s light took 13 billion light years to reach Earth, and astronomers estimate that it formed when our universe was only 500 million years old. Although 500 million years is long time for us, it is miniscule compared to the age of our universe, 13.8 billion years.

Astronomers know of only about ten other galaxies that formed so soon after the Big Bang. This newly discovered galaxy, however, is significantly smaller and fainter than the others.

They were able to find it due to gravity’s crazy ability to bend light. Researchers aimed Hubble at the three massive galaxy clusters, shown in the boxes in this image. Galaxy clusters are the most massive regions in the universe, and their gravitational pull is so great that it can noticably bend light.

As a result, we can see objects located behind these galaxy clusters because the light from the objects, that would not otherwise reach Earth, is bent toward us by these clusters. Moreover, the object is magnified in the process, and the team used this to their advantage to estimate the galaxy’s distance, size, and behavior.

NASA/ESAGravity has a crazy ability to bend light, and astronomers used this to their advantage by looking at how three massive galaxy clusters, boxes out in this image, bent light from the same distant, faint galaxy discussed in this article.

“This object is a unique example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of small and faint galaxies at about 500 million years after the Big Bang,” study researcher Adi Zitrin of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

“The discovery is telling us that galaxies as faint as this one exist, and we should continue looking for them and even fainter objects so that we can understand how galaxies, and the universe, have evolved over time,” Zitrin said.

The international team of astronomers who conducted the study estimate that this distant galaxy is about 850 light-years across. Our galaxy, the Milky Way is about 100 times longer.

Although the galaxy is small, it’s actually cooking up stars at an impressive rate for its size. The Milky Way produces about one star every year. This galaxy produces one star every three years, but for a galaxy that is 100 times smaller, that is extremely efficient, the team said.

Bruno Gilli/ ESOA fish-eye mosaic of the Milky Way arching across the night sky. Our home galaxy is about 100,000 light-years long.

Measuring the star formation rate in these very distant galaxies is important for figuring out why we see what we do in the universe. For much of the first 100 million years of the lifetime of the universe, light from the first stars was constantly being absorbed by cold hydrogen gas permeating space. As a result, the universe was foggy.

It’s hard to tell when radiation began warming the hydrogen gas that clouded the universe, but astronomers estimate it happened between 150 million to one billion years after the Big Bang. It’s also hard to know what created this heat, but some think it was these early stars forming in distant galaxies that Hubble is probing.

As a result of this warming, which experts call ionization, the particles in the hydrogen gas no longer blocked the visible light from stars, making the universe transparent. Below is an animation simulating what this may have looked like:

This is why we can see so far back into time today and, ultimately, why the science field of astronomy exists in the first place.

“We tend to assume that galaxies ionized the universe with their ultraviolet light. But we do not see enough galaxies or light that could do that,” Zitrin said in the released statement. “So we need to look at fainter and fainter galaxies,” to learn how the universe evolved in its earliest days.

This study includes one of the most accurate distance estimates to a distant galaxy ever made. For more information on the technique they used and how they did it, check out their paper, which was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters on Sept. 4.

Throughout the summer, the National Post will be taking readers back to school with week-long lessons on a series of subjects ranging from backyard astronomy to playground aerodynamics and beyond. In this week’s class: amusement parks and the human body.

Throughout the summer, the National Post will be taking readers back to school with week-long lessons on a series of subjects ranging from backyard astronomy to playground aerodynamics and beyond. In this week’s class: the physics of playground aerodynamics. Check back at this location as new lessons on this subject are added throughout the week.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel has done nothing to cripple the Jewish state’s economy. But it has scored a few big symbolic victories. This week, it scored one of its biggest: Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking withdrew from a prestigious June 18-20 conference personally sponsored by Israel’s President. His May 3 letter to the conference organizers stated: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended, I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.”

Israel supporters are up in arms. They know that Israel has been stung. Still, it’s important to put this gesture in context: Hawking is just one A-list star who’d been scheduled to attend the conference. Other (non-boycotting attendees) include Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Prince Albert of Monaco.

As for Hawking himself, this seems like a self-defeating move. It will briefly make him a celebrity among activists, but it will also cast a controversial political gloss on a reputation that is otherwise built on his pedigree as a great scientist (though admittedly this isn’t the first time he’s opined on world events — a decade ago, he called the Iraq Invasion a “war crime”). Moreover, Israelis and diaspora Jews are heavily represented in the world of theoretical physics. This move will lose him friends and collaborators in the twilight of his life and career.

So here’s a suggestion for Hawking — which I offer on the (admittedly thin) conceit that he might read advice offered to him by a Canadian opinion writer: Go to Israel. Attend the conference. Take the podium. Tell off your hosts. Tell that that their current policy is wrong. Be part of the debate. Many Israelis will agree with you (in fact, I would probably agree with much of it myself). And they will take you more seriously because you will have had the courage to speak your mind on Israeli soil — as opposed to just becoming a quantum-mechanical version of Naomi Klein.

The additional complication for Hawking, as a scientist, is that many of the scientific devices and innovations the world relies on were pioneered by Israeli scientists. That includes numerous breakthrough in the world of medical science, which Hawking might be especially inclined to appreciate.

Indeed, it always seems odd when scientists bash Israel in favour of Arab societies whose contributions to the world of science have flatlined in recent centuries — just as anti-Israel gay groups (such as QuAIA here in Canada) attract derision for repeating talking points provided by militantly homophobic Palestinian leaders.

And so I will go further with my advice for Mr. Hawking: After he attends next month’s Presidential conference in Jerusalem — which is entitled “The Human Factor in Shaping Tomorrow” — I would urge him to travel to Gaza and the West Bank, to promote another cause that might be dear to his heart, and on which he certainly can speak with authority: the humane treatment of people with disabilities.

As a theoretical physicist, Hawking lives in a world of thought experiments. So here’s one for him: How would his life have been different had he been born into Palestinian society?

For one thing, he would have had to deal with the brutality that has accompanied the Middle East conflict, on both sides, since the early part of the 20th century. But he also would have had to deal with something else: the hostility of Palestinians to anyone cursed (as they see it) with any sort of crippling disease, such as the ALS-related motor neuron disease with which Hawking himself is afflicted.

Hawking would have ample opportunity to deliver his message of education and empowerment to Palestinian parents, from his wheelchair: Let your children flourish, and look what they can achieve

Here, for instance, is how a Christian charity, pro Terra Sancta, describes the challenges they face in providing support for disabled Palestinians: “In Palestine, from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, there is no support in place for children with learning difficulties of for families with disabled children. In the traditional mindset, disability is still seen as a form of divine punishment and brings shame on the family. It is particularly a problem for females, who struggle to marry and are therefore cast out of society. Many families choose to isolate disabled family members, not allowing them to leave the house.”

The Palestinian territories can be dangerous. But surely Hawking, after delivering his scathing remarks in Jerusalem, would be welcomed as a visiting dignitary. He would then have ample opportunity to deliver his message of education and empowerment to parents of disabled Palestinian children, from his wheelchair: Let your children flourish, and look what renown they can achieve.

If he chooses, Hawking might even wish to cite specific examples — such as Palestinian 3-year-old Mohammed al-Farra, a multiple amputee who lives with his grandfather in Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital.

AP Photo/Dan BaliltyPalestinian child Mohammed Al-Farra is seen in the Tel Hashomer Hospital near Ramat Gan, central Israel. His parents abandoned him and the Palestinian government wont pay for his care.

“His parents abandoned him,” the Washington Postreports. “Mohammed’s plight is an extreme example of the harsh treatment some families mete to the disabled, particularly in the more tribal-dominated corners of the Gaza Strip … It also demonstrates a costly legacy of Gaza’s strongly patriarchal culture that prods women into first-cousin marriages and allows polygamy, while rendering mothers powerless over their children’s fate … In the midst of [Mohammed’s] treatment, his mother abandoned Mohammed because her husband, ashamed of their son, threatened to take a second wife if she didn’t leave the baby and return.”

Certainly, Hawking is no stranger to the campaign for disabled dignity: In the 1990s, he was one of a dozen eminent individuals who signed the “Charter for the Third Millennium on Disability,” which champions the rights of the world’s 600-million disabled people. This is an opportunity for him to advance that agenda.

If he wishes to do so, Stephen Hawking is perfectly entitled to prosecute his campaign to make Israel a pariah among nations. But surely, the great scientist would no doubt agree, no three-year-old should be a pariah in his own family.

jkay@nationalpost.comjonkay
— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

Canadian researchers have succeeded in side-stepping an obstacle of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a strange law of the quantum world that says precise measurement is impossible, because the act of measuring changes what you are trying to measure.

Their experiment in an Ottawa lab — in which they measured the polarization states of single light particles, called photons — is seen as a small step toward a quantum computer, a major goal of modern science.

“These results are the first direct measurements that are applicable to qubits — the fundamental unit of quantum information,” the authors write in Nature Photonics.

Regular computers represent data with ones and zeroes, called bits. But a quantum computer would use qubits, or quantum bits, which take advantage of the mysterious properties of matter on its smallest scale.

These include superposition, in which a qubit could be simultaneously one and zero, and entanglement, in which two qubits could remain connected even when they are physically far away.

By offering the prospect of an unbreakable code, or the ability to factor large numbers so fast that the best current code is easily cracked, quantum computing has lured massive research and investment.

BlackBerry billionaire Mike Lazaridis, for example, has invested millions in the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, and his recent hiring of the astronaut and former Canadian Space Agency head Steve MacLean to head up a new venture in applied quantum physics — the purpose is still mysterious, but definitely involves computing — has bolstered the area’s claim to the nickname “Quantum Valley.”

The new paper, by researchers at the University of Ottawa and the University of Rochester, is co-authored with Robert Boyd, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics.

Lead author Jeff Salvail, now a Master’s student at Simon Fraser University, described the experiment as sneaking a peek at Schrödinger’s Cat, one of the most baffling paradoxes of quantum theory.

It’s strange, but so fascinating

Invented in 1935 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, the cat story was meant to criticize the strange notion that quantum particles can exist in multiple states at once — known as superposition — and until you actually make a direct observation, each possibility is equally true.

So imagine a cat in a box containing a vial of poison gas that is rigged to a device that detects the radioactive decay of a particle. If it decays, it will trip a switch that smashes the vial and the cat will die. If it does not decay, the cat will be alive.

According to quantum mechanics, until you actually look inside the box, both possibilities are true. The particle has both decayed and not decayed; the vial is both smashed and intact; and the cat is both alive and dead.

As yet unresolved, this paradox has inspired many efforts to explain when and how matter stops behaving according to quantum laws, as decaying atoms do, and starts behaving according to classical laws, as cats do.

“To completely determine a quantum state, which is described in general by complex numbers, one must perform multiple measurements on many identical copies of the system,” the authors write. “Directly measuring a quantum system relies on the technique of weak measurement: extracting so little information from a single measurement that the state does not collapse.”

“I can’t say that we’re getting around the Uncertainty limit, because within quantum mechanics there is no getting around it,” said Mr. Salvail.He cautioned that explaining such things in words risks “losing the subtleties that are captured in the mathematical expression” of the theory.

“We’ve kind of gone back and exploited the subtleties in the Uncertainty Principle,” he said. “It’s strange, but so fascinating.”

A much anticipated announcement from European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, may have been scooped by an errant video leak.

The Telegraph has published a pre-recorded video apparently from CERN spokesperson Joe Incandela. The video shows Incandela explaining that CERN has found a “new” particle similar to the theoretical Higgs boson.

CERN responded to the Telegraph story by saying they have pre-recorded several videos in preparation of Wednesday’s announcement — some showing victory with the Higgs boson found, and some showing defeat with the Higgs still elusive.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GettyImagesA graphic showing traces of collision of particles at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience is pictured with a slow speed experience at Universe of Particles exhibition of the the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on December 13, 2011 in Geneva.US-based physicists reported on July 3, 2012 finding strong hints of the Higgs boson, the elusive "God particle" believed to give objects mass, but said European data is needed to confirm any potential discovery

What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs boson is a theorised sub-atomic particle that is believed to confer mass.

It is conceived as existing in a treacly, invisible field that stretches acrosss the Universe. Higgs bosons “stick” to fundamental particles of matter, dragging on them.

Some of these particles interact more with the Higgs than others and thus have greater mass. But particles of light, also called photons, are impervious to it and have no mass.

The Telegraph cast doubt on this explanation, wondering why such videos would need to be recorded, as this is not a political election, but a scientific experiment where the results are known in advance.

The Higgs has confounded scientists since 1964, when British physicist Peter Higgs helped lay the conceptual foundation for it.

If it exists, it would vindicate the so-called Standard Model of physics, which identifies the building blocks for matter and the particles that convey fundamental forces.

On the eve of the announcement, rumours flew about what CERN had in store. On Twitter, a conversational thread was called “Higgsteria,” and managed to fuel speculation and quash it at the same time.

“Whether or not the Higgs has been found, tomorrow will be exciting,” Professor Sir Peter Knight, president of Britain’s Institute of Physics said.

“If the Standard Model is confirmed via the discovery of the Higgs boson or whether we need to abandon and start re-writing the textbooks, it’s a historical day in science that we should all be proud of.”

A big question concerns the degree of probability to make a claim.

CERN physicists have said they will not make an announcement until they have proof — from two laboratories working independently at the mighty Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — that the risk of a statistical fluke is vanishingly small.

AP Photo/Anja NiedringhausA wall painting by artist Josef Kristofoletti is seen at the Atlas experiment site at the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, outside Geneva, Switzerland. The painting shows how a Higgs boson may look. Scientists at CERN plan to make an announcement on Wednesday, July 4, 2012 about their hunt for the elusive sub-atomic particle.

In scientific parlance, the goal is “five sigma,” meaning that there is just a 0.00006% chance that what the two laboratories found is a mathematical quirk.

In a news report, the British science journal Nature said CERN will announce that the two labs saw signals of a new particle with a probability of between 4.5 and five sigma.

But CERN will stop short of calling it the Higgs until more is known about what the particle does, Nature said.

“Crucially, they will want to know whether it behaves like a mass-giving Higgs, and more specifically whether it behaves like the Higgs predicted in the Standard Model,” the journal said.

Last week, CERN boss Rolf Heuer cautioned about the need for verification.

“It’s a bit like spotting a familiar face from far. Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it’s really your best friend, or your best friend’s twin.”

Because the Higgs cannot be seen, its existence — or not — has to be inferred.

This is done by smashing protons together in an underground tunnel, providing a tiny but fierce collision that causes sub-atomic debris to fly into detectors built into the 360-degree walls of a car-sized lab.

The trick then is to sift through the signals from this smashup and look for a pattern that points to the Higgs.

The boson has been so slippery because it is believed to decay almost instantly after it interacts with other particles to endow them with mass.

Over the years, tens of thousands of physicists have been thrown into the search for the Higgs, and billions of dollars spent on colliders.

A U.S. machine, the Tevatron, came agonisingly close before it was mothballed in 2011 after 26 years of operations.

Its vanguard role was supplanted by the far bigger LHC, a behemoth that comprises four labs dotted around a ring-shaped tunnel, 27 kilometres long, straddling the Franco-Swiss border.

In a presentation on Monday of data that was analysed after the closure, physicists at Fermilab said they had strong hints that the Higgs exists, but the signal was 2.9 sigma, which falls short of the five-sigma threshold.

According to Nature, the signature occurred at a mass of around 125 gigaelectronvolts, when a Higgs-like particle decayed into two photons, or particles of light.

The Tevatron and the LHC carried out exhaustive experiments to narrow down the mass field and to identify potential Higgs patterns, a task “much worse than (seeking) a needle in a haystack,” Fermilab physicist Joe Lykken said.

CERN handoutAn image released by CERN of a candidate event in the search for the Higgs boson

Why is the Higgs boson important?

The origin of mass (meaning the resistance of an object to being moved) has been fiercely debated for decades.

Finding the Higgs boson would vindicate the so-called Standard Model of physics, a theory that developed in the early 1970s, which says the Universe is made from 12 particles which provide the building blocks for all matter.

These fundamental particles are divided into a bestiary comprising six leptons and six quarks, which have exotic names such as “strange,” “up”, “tau” and “charm.”

Why is it called the Higgs boson?

The name comes from a British physicist, Peter Higgs, who conceived of a field of mass-confering particles while walking in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 1964.

Important theoretical work was also done by Belgian physicists Robert Brout and Francois Englert.

Bosons are non-matter particles which are force carriers, or messengers that act between matter particles.

The interaction gives rise to three fundamental forces — the strong force, the weak force and the electromagnatic force. There is a fourth force, gravity, which is suspected to be caused by a still-to-be found boson named the graviton.

How has the Higgs been hunted?

The quest to prove, or disprove, the Higgs has been carried out at particle colliders: giant machines that smash protons together and sift through the sub-atomic debris that tumbles out.

The big daddy of these is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in a ring-shaped tunnel deep underground near Geneva.

Smashups generated at the LHC briefly generate temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, replicating the conditions that occurred just after the Universe’s creation in the “Big Bang” nearly 14 billion years ago.

But these concentrations of energy, while violent, occur only at a tiny scale.

Evidence to support the existence of the Higgs is indirect.

In the same way that we can cannot see the wind, we infer its existence and strength from leaves or flags or other objects that it moves.

Why ‘The God particle’?

The Higgs has become known as the “God particle,” the quip being that, like God, it is everywhere but hard to find.

In fact, the origin of the name is rather less poetic.

It comes from the title of a book by Nobel physicist Leon Lederman whose draft title was “The Goddamn Particle,” to describe the frustrations of trying to nail the Higgs.

The title was cut back to “The God Particle” by his publisher, apparently fearful that “Goddamn” could be offensive.

BATAVIA, Ill. — Physicists at a U.S. laboratory said on Monday they have come tantalizingly close to proving the existence of the elusive subatomic Higgs boson – often called the “God particle” because it may bring mass and order to the universe.

The announcement by the Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago came two days before physicists at CERN, the European particle accelerator near Geneva, are set to unveil their own findings in the Higgs hunt. CERN houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

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The Fermilab scientists found hints of the Higgs in the debris from trillions of collisions between beams of protons and anti-protons over 10 years at the lab’s now-shuttered Tevatron accelerator.

But the evidence still fell short of the scientific threshold for proof of the discovery of the particle, they said, in that the same collision debris hinting at the existence of the Higgs could also come from other subatomic particles.

“This is the best answer that is out there at the moment,” said physicist Rob Roser of Fermilab, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy. “The Tevatron data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a firm discovery.”

Scientists have worked long and hard to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, the final piece of a model proposed four decades ago laying out the basic building blocks of matter in the universe.

The Higgs particle’s presumed power to confer mass seems to endow it with the power of creation itself, which helped lead to its “God particle” nickname. Many physicists loathe the term, fretting that it makes their discipline seem self-aggrandizing.

Physicists not connected to Fermilab expressed cautious optimism that the long-sought particle had finally been found.

“These intriguing hints from the Tevatron appear to support the results from the LHC shown at CERN in December,” said Dan Tovey, professor of particle physics at the University of Sheffield in Britain.

“The results are particularly important because they use a completely different and complementary way of searching for the Higgs boson. This gives us more confidence that what we are seeing is really evidence of new physics rather than just a statistical fluke,” Tovey added.

Tovey said scientists will have to wait until Wednesday for the latest results from the European scientists before “getting the full picture” concerning the Higgs boson.

’A NICE RESULT’

CERN spokesman James Gillies called Fermilab’s findings “a nice result,” but added that “it will be interesting to see how it lines up with CERN’s results on Wednesday. Nature is the final arbiter so we’ll have to be a little more patient before we know for sure whether we’ve found the Higgs.”

Tom LeCompte, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois who works at CERN and knows the results, said he was confident the Higgs would be shown to exist, or not exist, this year. But he would not say if the findings to be unveiled Wednesday would be definitive.

“I know 2012 is the year. I can’t tell you July is the month,” LeCompte said.

Others were less cautious. “This is the most exciting week in physics history,” said theoretical physicist Joe Lykken of Fermilab.

The Higgs particle is the final quarry in a hunt that began some 40 years ago, when physicists assembled what is now known as the Standard Model. The model is considered the culmination of a quest for the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that determine how they interact, a search that began some 2,400 years ago with Greek philosopher Democritus’ hypothesis that everything is composed of indivisible atoms.

According to the Standard Model, matter is composed of various combinations of six leptons, including the well-known electron and the ghostly neutrino, and six quarks, to which physicists have given whimsical names such as “charm,” “bottom,” and “strange.” The protons at the core of atoms, for instance, are composed of two “up” quarks and one “down” quark.

The Standard Model also includes particles dubbed bosons, which carry nature’s four basic forces.

The best-known boson is the particle of light, the photon. It carries the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for such everyday phenomena as the scent of a rose and the pull of a magnet.

Another boson is called the gluon. It binds together the quarks that constitute protons. Without gluons, quarks would stick together no better than an undercooked soufflDe, atoms would not exist, and neither would stars, planets or life.

Particle accelerators such as those at CERN and Fermilab methodically discovered all the particles predicted by the Standard Model except one.

SQUARE ONE

The hold-out is the Higgs boson, and its refusal to show itself has long frustrated physicists. The Higgs particle is needed to complete and validate the Standard Model, since if it turns out not to exist scientists would have to figure out the constituents and mechanics of the universe from square one.

Just as importantly, the existence of Higgs was postulated in 1964 to serve a crucial function: conferring mass on some particles that would otherwise have none. Technically, the Higgs particle itself does not provide mass; the particle is, instead, a little knot of matter squeezed out of a force field like a curd forming in soured milk.

The force field is called – of course – the Higgs field.

The Higgs field gives mass to some particles but leaves others alone, in a process one might compare to making cotton candy. As the wand is passed through the gossamer cloud of spun sugar, it holds onto more and more of the pink strands.

In much the same way, particles passing through the Higgs field picked up more and more mass, until they became the quarks and leptons and bosons that constitute the stuff of today’s cosmos. In this analogy, some wands are oiled, preventing sugar from sticking; these particles remain without mass. Other wands are super-sticky, picking up more than their fair share of mass.

The particle is named after Peter Higgs, now 83, of the University of Edinburgh in Britain, but five other physicists came up with the same idea almost simultaneously.

“The God Particle” was the title of a 1993 book by Leon Lederman, a Nobel-winning physicist and former head of Fermilab, and science writer Dick Teresi. The publisher vetoed titles with “Higgs” or anything else too esoteric. Lederman later said he wanted to call the book “The Goddamned Particle” because the Higgs was so elusive.

Fermilab began its Higgs quest 10 years ago, using its four-mile (6.4 km) circumference Tevatron to smash together protons and their anti-matter twins, anti-protons. When matter meets anti-matter, the two annihilate, leaving behind pure energy.

Out of that energy crystallize new particles. It was in this debris that the Tevatron scientists sought evidence of the Higgs boson.

Because the Higgs is hypothesized to exist for a mere fraction of a second before decaying into other particles, the strategy was to look for these “daughter” particles.

CERN’s 16.7-mile (27 km) circumference LHC, which smashes protons against protons at nearly the speed of light, looks for two high-energy photons. The Tevatron looked for two bottom quarks. Before budget cuts forced it to shut down last September after trillions of proton-anti-proton collisions, it found as many as 1,000 pairs that could have come from Higgs particles.

“It is a real cliffhanger,” said physicist Gregorio Bernardi of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of High Energies in Paris and leader of one of the Tevatron experiments. “We know exactly what signal we are looking for in our data, and we see some evidence for the production and decay of Higgs bosons in a crucial decay mode with a pair of bottom quarks. So we are very excited.”

The Tevatron results indicate that the Higgs particle has a mass between 118 and 132 giga-electron volts (the unit of mass-energy used in physics in which 1 GeV is about the mass of the proton). Last year, the LHC pegged the mass at between 115 and 127 GeV.

PARIS — European scientists said Friday they had detected a subatomic particle that sheds light on one of the basic forces of nature which determines the structure of matter.

The particle, a baryon called Xi—b, cannot be detected directly as it is too unstable, but scientists observed traces of it in a test at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

“The discovery of the new particle confirms the theory of how quarks bind and therefore helps to understand the strong interaction, one of the four basic forces of physics which determines the structure of matter,” said a statement from the University of Zurich, whose scientists were involved in the test.

A quark is one of the basic building blocks of matter — three quarks together form one baryon, examples of which are protons and neutrons.

Quarks are never directly observed or found in nature and are only known as component pieces of baryons.

This helps scientist understand the theory of how Quarks bind and helps explain the strong interaction or strong nuclear force, once of the four fundamental interactions in particle physics (the other three are the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity).

The LHC is the world’s largest particle collider, leading efforts to find the Higgs Boson subatomic particle believed to confer mass.

Agence France-Presse

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/scientists-at-the-large-hadron-collider-detect-new-subatomic-particle/feed/2stdA technician looks at computers screen during the preparation of the beam in the Control Room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva April 5, 2012Could Einstein be right after all? Scientists admit errors in ‘relativity-busting’ testhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/cern-admits-errors-in-relativity-busting-test-but-says-glitch-could-mean-even-faster-faster-than-light-particles
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GENEVA — Physicists are to run new tests in May after the CERN research institute said on Thursday that its startling findings appearing to show that one of Einstein’s fundamental theories was wrong could have been caused by a loose cable. However, they say that one of the glitches might have made them underestimate, not overestimate, the results.

The CERN lab near Geneva appeared to contradict Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity last year when they reported that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractionally faster than light.

Einstein’s theory, which underpins the current view of how the universe works, says that nothing can travel faster than light, and doing so would be like traveling back in time.

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CERN said two possible effects had been identified that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement during its OPERA experiment. “New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May,” it said in a statement.

One effect concerned an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS (Global Positioning System) synchronisations, which could have led scientists to overestimate the neutrino’s time of flight.

National Post GraphicsClick here to see a full sized graphic on how the Large Hadron Collider works

However, the other effect appeared to be more significant in the faster-than-light finding of the original OPERA experiment.

“The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken,” said CERN. “If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos.”

The faster-than-light finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to an underground Italian laboratory at Gran Sasso near Rome.

James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) said late on Wednesday that the result was now in doubt.

“A possible explanation has been found. But we won’t know until we have tested it out with a new beam to Gran Sasso,” Gillies told Reuters in Geneva.

Physicists on the experiment said when they reported it last September that they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found.

A second test whose results were announced in November appeared to provide further evidence that neutrinos were travelling faster than light. But many experts remained sceptical of a result that would have overturned one of the fundamental principles of modern physics.

Edward Blucher, chairman of the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago, said the original finding would have been breathtaking if it had been true. As it was, the research inspired many spirited discussions, if few believers.

“I don’t think I met anyone who said I bet it’s going to be true. I think the people on the experiment worked as carefully as they could and I think they ran out of ideas of what could be wrong and they decided to present it,” he said.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/cern-admits-errors-in-relativity-busting-test-but-says-glitch-could-mean-even-faster-faster-than-light-particles/feed/2std507751529Click here to see a full sized graphic on how the Large Hadron Collider worksLarge Hadron Collider discovers its first new particle since beginning in 2009http://news.nationalpost.com/news/large-hadron-collider-finds-new-variant-of-sub-atomic-particle
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PARIS – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made its first discovery of a new particle since it started operating on the French-Swiss border in 2009.

Scientists reported on Thursday that the LHC, famously engaged in the quest for the Higgs boson, turned up a heavier variant of a sub-atomic particle first discovered a quarter-century ago.

The newcomer is called Chi-b(3P), which was uncovered in the debris from colliding protons, according to research published in the open-access online journal arxiv.

Like the elusive Higgs and the photon, it is a boson, meaning it is a particle that carries force.

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But while the Higgs is not believed to be made of smaller particles, the Chi-b(3) comprises two relatively heavy particles, the beauty quark and its antiquark.

They are bonded by the so-called “strong” force which also causes the atomic nucleus to stick together.

The Chi-b(3P) is a heavier version of a particle that was first observed around 25 years ago.

“The Chi-b(3P) is a particle that was predicted by many theorists, but was not observed at previous experiments,” said James Walder, a British physicist quoted by the University of Birmingham in a press release.

Described by some as the world’s largest machine, the LHC is located in a 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring-shaped tunnel near Geneva that straddles the Franco-Swiss border up to 175 metres (580 feet) below ground.

Streams of protons are fired in opposite, but parallel, directions in the tunnel.

The beams are then bent by powerful magnets so that some of the protons collide in four giant labs, which are lined with detectors to record the sub-atomic debris that results.

On December 13, physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said they had narrowed the search for the Higgs — the so-called “God particle” that may confer mass.

The theory behind the Higgs is that mass does not derive from particles themselves.

Instead, it comes from a boson that interacts strongly with some particles but less, if at all, with others.

Finding the Chi-b(3P) is a further test of the powers of the LHC, which became the world’s biggest particle collider when it was completed in 2008.

“Our new measurements are a great way to test theoretical calculations of the forces that act on fundamental particles, and will move us a step closer to understanding how the Universe is held together,” said Miram Watson, a British research fellow working on the CHi-b(3) investigation.

A massive collaborative effort that brings in physicists from around the world, the LHC has cost more than 6.03 billion Swiss francs (roughly 5.9 billion euros, US$4.5-billion).

On the eve of a a seminar on Tuesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), about the Higgs Boson, or “God Particle,” we take a look inside the massive atom-smashing machine known as the Large Hadron Collider, which is at the heart of the discovery. Go here for more on the Higgs Boson

What is the Higgs Boson?

The Higgs was proposed in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs as a way of explaining why other particles have mass

In essence, it’s a hypothesis for why all the other particles have mass, which in the presence of gravity becomes weight. It is called a particle, but usually exists as a wave, and when other particles pass through it, they are slowed down like a fly in honey.

Hailed as the world’s largest particle accelerator, the LHC works by forcing superfast particles traveling clockwise and counter-clockwise into head-on collisions, a process illustrated in this animation.

CERN

When the collision occurs, the multi-billion-dollar machine, built by the European research consortium CERN, is designed to find the Higgs boson (God) particle by recreating what scientist believe are the “Big Bang” conditions surrounding the birth of the universe.

The National Post‘s Joseph Brean explains the Higgs boson in a recent article.

The Higgs was proposed in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs as a way of explaining why other particles have mass

In essence, it’s a hypothesis for why all the other particles have mass, which in the presence of gravity becomes weight. It is called a particle, but usually exists as a wave, and when other particles pass through it, they are slowed down like a fly in honey.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/large-hadron-collider/feed/3stdA file photo on April 26, 2007 provided by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) shows a large dipole magnet symbolically lowered into the tunnel, in Geneva, to mark the end of a crucial phase of installation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).Large Hadron Collider animationLarge Hadron ColliderPhysicist strikes blow for data security after developing method to generate truly random numbers using lasershttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/physicist-strikes-blow-for-data-security-after-developing-method-to-generate-truly-random-numbers-using-lasers
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By Tom Spears

OTTAWA — An Ottawa physicist has developed a way to generate random numbers, the key to encrypting data in ways that hackers can’t figure out.

Ben Sussman builds quantum technologies at the National Research Council. He’s tapping into the fact that at the tiny (or quantum) scale of photons and electrons, events don’t follow our familiar ideas of cause and effect, and can happen in completely random ways.

To people who want to encrypt data, this is a potential source of randomly-chosen numbers that are used as a “key” to lock and unlock sensitive data — military transmissions, banking transactions, or your email.

The idea is that if no one knows how the key was created in the first place, hackers and code-breakers won’t be able to figure out the secret and decode the messages.

Sussman’s new method, involving pulses of laser light in an Ottawa lab, has the potential to create truly random numbers in large quantities, and fast.

“If you want to defeat an adversary who is trying to hack into your system, basically you need large quantities of random numbers,” he said in an interview.

“This has the potential to scale to extraordinarily fast rates, which is becoming more and more important as information networks expand and there are higher data rate requirements.”

Sussman’s Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second.

His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes.

“This out-coming light is very, very special,” Sussman says.

It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space.

Normally, we can know what happens to objects in physics, at least on the scale of most objects big enough to see. Even dice aren’t truly random. We usually don’t know enough to predict how they will roll, but they are still governed by laws of motion.

But the interactions changing the light are different. “What quantum mechanics tells us is that it’s against the laws of physics to know” exactly what happens, Sussman said.

What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman’s lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is.

Those measurements are his random numbers.

The NRC notes in an announcement of his work that “most current technologies depend on number sequences generated by computational algorithms that are actually deterministic — only giving the appearance of being random.

“As technologies depending upon random number sequences proliferate, the fact that the numbers are not really random becomes increasingly problematic.”

Picking random numbers can even ensure that a lottery is fair.

Sussman adds that “a truly random number generator will provide impenetrable encryption for communications — be they military transmissions, secure banking, or online purchasing — that underpin the modern connected world.”

GENEVA — An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

There have been several conflicting results since the September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies (though not backed up by others), caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein’s ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso — which is deep under mountains and run by Italy’s National Institute of National Physics — now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, the ICARUS team says their findings “refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result.”

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was “very simple and definitive.”

It says, he wrote, “that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero.”

Under Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared — at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan — to try to replicate OPERA’s findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.

LONDON — A new experiment appears to provide further evidence that Einstein may have been wrong when he said nothing could go faster than the speed of light, a theory that underpins modern thinking on how the universe works.

The new evidence, challenging a dogma of science that has held since Albert Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in 1905, appeared to confirm a startling finding that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster.

The new experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory, using a neutrino beam from CERN in Switzerland, 720 km away, was held to check findings in September by a team of scientists which were greeted with some skepticism.

Scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) said in a statement on Friday that their new tests aimed to exclude one potential systematic effect that may have affected the original measurement.

“A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny,” said Fernando Ferroni, president of the INFN.

“The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world.”

An international team of scientists shocked the scientific world with the original findings in September.

That first finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to Gran Sasso, an underground Italian laboratory near Rome.

Physicists on the experiment, called OPERA after the initials of its formal scientific title, said they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found.

If confirmed, scientists say the findings may show that Einstein — seen as the father of modern physics — was wrong when he set out in his theory of special relativity that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and nothing can go faster.

This would force a major rethink of theories about how the cosmos works and even mean it would be possible, in theory, to send information into the past.

The Italian scientists, whose second set of results were published in online science journal ArXiv, said one potential source of error in the first results was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by CERN were relatively long at around 10 microseconds each, so measuring their exact arrival time at Gran Sasso could have had relatively large errors.

To account for this, the beams sent by CERN in this latest experiment were around three nanoseconds shorter, with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them, meaning the scientists at Gran Sasso would time their arrival more accurately.

“In this way, compared to the previous measurement, the neutrinos bunches are narrower and more spaced from each other,” the scientists said. “This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity at the price of a much lower beam intensity.”

Jacques Martino, director of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, who worked on the second experiment, said that while this test was not a full confirmation, it did remove some of the potential systematic errors that may have occurred in the first one.

“The search is not over,” he said in a statement. “There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion.”

Christos Touramanis, who heads a neutrino research team at Britain’s Liverpool University and is involved in scrutinizing the OPERA result as part of CERN’s scientific committee, agreed the new test with short beam bunches had excluded one possible source of systematic errors, but said “a number of other possible effects” still needed to be checked.

“Ultimately, full independent confirmation will be required before accepting this result as accurate,” he said in an emailed comment.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/beat-it-einstein-neutrinos-still-faster-than-speed-of-light-new-experiment-shows/feed/4stdA general view of the detector "OPERA" at the LNGS (Gran Sasso National Laboratory) near L'Aquila, central Italy in this undated handout photograph. An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe. The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in central ItalyFaster than the speed of light?: Scientists re-test experiment that stunned scientific worldhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-scientists-re-test-experiment-that-stunned-scientific-world
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PARIS — Scientists who threw down the gauntlet to physics by reporting particles that broke the universe’s speed limit said on Friday they were revisiting their contested experiment.

“The new test began two or three days ago,” said Stavros Kasavenas, deputy head of France’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics, also called the IN2P3.

“The criticism is that the results we had were a statistical quirk. The test should help (us) address this,” he told AFP.

On September 23, the team stunned particle physicists by saying they had measured neutrinos that travelled around six kilometres per second faster than the velocity of light, determined by Einstein to be the highest speed possible.

The neutrinos had been measured along a 732-kilometre trajectory between the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy.

Through a complex transformation, a few of the protons arrive at their destination as neutrinos, travelling through Earth’s crust.

The scientists at CERN and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy scrutinised the results of the so-called Opera experiment for nearly six months before making the announcement.

They admitted they were flummoxed and put out the begging bowl for an explanation. The results have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Since then, an open-access online physics review, Arxiv, has had scores of papers submitted to it.

Some point to perceived technical glitches, noting that only a minute flaw in measurement would have had the neutrinos busting the speed of light.

Mr. Kasavenas said CERN was making available a special form of proton beam until November 6.

The idea is to assess a modified measurement technique.

If this works, the technique will be used in a bigger, “highly important” experiment that will be carried out in April, he said.

“The idea with the new beam is to have protons that are generated in packets lasting one or two nanoseconds with a gap between each packet of 500 nanoseconds,” he said.

“We will be able to measure the neutrinos one by one, but to do this we need a beam that is a hundred times less intense than the previous one.”

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-scientists-re-test-experiment-that-stunned-scientific-world/feed/2stdEquipment at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory in Rome